It wouldn't be a 'laser' laser. Also it would have to be a tunnel obviously.

I was just postualting an interesting area of research.

Also it wouldn't have to create a vacuum, just lower the density. Even heating a column of air would lower its density. But it would have to work on some new trick similar to fiddling with the electostatic forces within the tunnel, and not brute forcing the air out of the way.

Wouldn't it be sufficient to remove the air directly around and before the spacecraft? And might it be possible to integrate the laser into the spacecraft it the answer to my first question is yes?

I remember that in the case of torpedos there has been a breakthrough to let the torpedo move within a bubble - without touch to the surrounding water. If something similar can be done concerning spacecrafts and air this might be a solution.

I am fairly sure lifting the laser would easily negate not lifting the air.

agreed. i'm not entirely sure what this laser's for since i haven't read the posts on it on the previous page (too lazy), but several ones on the ground that follow slightly in front of the vehicle may work just the same.

The idea is that if you could suck out all the air in a.....straw if you will...into space that you could launch spacecraft with total disregard to the friction that air causes on a craft lifting off into space thus dramatically lessening the energy cost required to exit earth's atmosphere. Recapture mechinisims could even be installed to allow eaiser re-entry without having to worry about protective (and usually expencive) heat shielding.

You could even utilize a varity of launch platforms. From Magnetic Repulsion to standard chemical based rockets. But what I wanted to know besides it's workability was if compressed air could be used to thust the vehicle (inside the "straw") into space in the way a cannon propells lead balls. Would the Air push the craft as it attempts to exit into the vacuum?

It's just, I have never ever heard about anyone else proposing anything like this before and wanted to know what you people thought.[/img]

I like the idea, seems like it would work. Although the Space Elevator seems more practical.

Well, with all the technology being developed for space ladder, it might be pheasable to build one of these in the next XX many years, but the problem is if you fired a space ship out of it like a bullet you would blow a hole through the bottom of it. If you can manage a structure to take so much verticle pressure, I would imagine you could easily topple the thing with the slightest outward pressure. You would have to find some magnetic or non-direct way of shooting something out, because the pressure that would bee needed to lift a modest 2 ton space ship I would imagine would (again) blow out the tube @ the first stage of 'liftoff' (unless the tube has been heavily re-enforced to specificly keep this from happening).

Either way, the space ladder is a somewhat simelar approach, and has the same basic concept of running something from the surface of the earth to the top of the sky, but it would use a lot less material than a whole tube - and even the slightest reduction in needed materials would save countless dollars. I still feel the best way to get in and out of earths orbit involves Brenulies Principle. But that is for a later thread.

Anyways, using a mountain would actually solve most of the structural problems.... The trick is getting the drilling gear that can actually pull that off. Anybody got some friends in NORAD who can tell us who built the Cheyenne Mountain installation?

IN PRINCIPLE the use of tubes for launches isn't a new idea I think - the rockets designed to carry nuclear bombs to the Sovietunion were installed within undergorund tubes to be launched out of - partially.

Perhaps a larger tube might be created within a dead vulcano.

To return to the question of lasers - I don't know wether I was the one being answerd to but when I was speaking of a laser integrated into a rocket I have been thinking of a special laser. There are lasers able to change the air into a plasma or remove the air like lightnings. Along the path of a lightning for a very short time there is a vacuum.

Somthing like this a had in mind in combination with the torpedos traveling within a bubble - they don't touch teh surrounding water anyway and they are ´very very fast because of this.